Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.

How energy campaigners lost their brief time in the sun

At St Breock’s church, just outside Wadebridge, lie the bones of Cornwall’s Faust. Jan Tregeagle, a pauper-persecuting 17th-century lawyer, is said to have sold his soul to the Devil and was eternally condemned to empty a bottomless pool with a holed limpet shell.

Today’s citizens may spare him some sympathy, for a bid by Wadebridge to be Britain’s first solar town seems to be becoming a similarly fruitless task. They believe they have been let down by a government whose policies they were trying to follow.